But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a marker. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears. — Alice Walker, from the foreword to Zora Neale
Hurston’s Barracoon

Compared with the forms of oppression they can now see via their proximity to me, it may seem to privileged people that it is easier to fix me than it is to fix the world. I live to disabuse people of that notion.

We were respectable.13 We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did.